Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal, historian,
journalist and lecturer, is a graduate of Cornell University and
Columbia Law School. During the Second World War, he served with
the US Army in the Middle East. He later served with the
Department of State, and as a consultant to the American
delegation at the organising meeting of the United Nations in San
Francisco.

Since 1947, he has been at the forefront in the
struggle for a balanced US policy in the Middle East. He is the
author of several acclaimed books on the Middle East, including
The Zionist Connection. He now lives in Washington, DC.

On December 18, 1993 Dr. Lilienthal celebrated
both his 80th birthday and the 40th anniversary of his first book,
What Price 'Israel'? Dr Lilienthal, who is a courageous
anti-Zionist Jew, was joined by more than 200 guests who travelled
from all over the United States to attend. The following excerpt
is taken from this first book, What Price 'Israel'?

Today, to trace anyone's descent to ancient Palestine would be a
genealogical impossibility; and to presume, axiomatically, such a
descent for Jews, alone among all human groups, is an assumption of
purely fictional significance. Most everybody in the Western world
could stake out some claim of Palestinian descent if genealogical
records could be established for two-thousand years. And there are,
indeed, people who, though not by the widest stretch of imagination
Jewish, proudly make that very claim: some of the oldest of the
South's aristocratic families play a game of comparing whose lineage
goes farther back into 'Israel'. No one knows what happened to the
Ten Lost Tribes of 'Israel', but to speculate on who might be who is
a favored Anglo-Saxon pastime, and Queen Victoria belonged to an
'Israelite' Society that traced the ancestry of its membership back
to those lost tribes.

Twelve tribes started in Canaan about thirty-five centuries ago;
and not only that ten of them disappeared - more than half of the
members of the remaining two tribes never returned from their "exile"
in Babylon. How then, can anybody claim to descend directly from that
relatively small community which inhabited the Holy Land at the time
of Abraham's Covenant with God?

The Jewish racial myth flows from the fact that the words Hebrew,
'Israelite', Jew, Judaism, and the Jewish people have been used
synonymously to suggest a historic continuity. But this is a misuse.
These words refer to different groups of people with varying ways of
life in different periods in history. Hebrew is a term correctly
applied to the period from the beginning of Biblical history to the
settling in Canaan. 'Israelite' refers correctly to the members of
the twelve tribes of 'Israel'. The name Yehudi or Jew is used in the
Old Testament to designate members of the tribe of Judah, descendants
of the fourth son of Jacob, as well as to denote citizens of the
Kingdom of Judah, particularly at the time of Jeremiah and under the
Persian occupation. Centuries later, the same word came to be applied
to anyone, no matter of what origin, whose religion was Judaism.

The descriptive name Judaism was never heard by the Hebrews or
'Israelites'; it appears only with Christianity. Flavius Josephus was
one of the first to use the name in his recital of the war with the
Romans to connote a totality of beliefs, moral commandments,
religious practices and ceremonial institutions of Galilee which he
believed superior to rival Hellenism. When the word Judaism was born,
there was no longer a Hebrew-'Israelite' state. The people who
embraced the creed of Judaism were already mixed of many races and
strains; and this diversification was rapidly growing...

Perhaps the most significant mass conversion to the Judaic faith
occurred in Europe, in the 8th century A.D., and that story of the
Khazars (Turko-Finnish people) is quite pertinent to the
establishment of the modern State of 'Israel'. This partly nomadic
people, probably related to the Volga Bulgars, first appeared in
Trans-Caucasia in the second century. They settled in what is now
Southern Russia, between the Volga and the Don, and then spread to
the shores of the Black, Caspian and Azov seas. The Kingdom of
Khazaria, ruled by a khagan or khakan fell to Attila the Hun in 448,
and to the Muslims in 737. In between, the Khazars ruled over part of
the Bulgarians, conquered the Crimea, and stretched their kingdom
over the Caucasus farther to the northwest to include Kiev, and
eastwards to Derbend. Annual tributes were levied on the Russian
Slavonians of Kiev. The city of Kiev was probably built by the
Khazars. There were Jews in the city and the surrounding area before
the Russian Empire was founded by the Varangians whom the
Scandinavian warriors sometimes called the Russ or Ross (circa
855-863).

The influence of the Khazars extended into what is now Hungary and
Roumania. Today, the villages of Kozarvar and Kozard in Transylvania
bear testimony to the penetration of the Khazars who, with the
Magyars, then proceeded into present-day Hungary. The size and power
of the Kingdom of Khazaria is indicated by the act that it sent an
army of 40,000 soldiers (in 626-627) to help Heraclius of the
Byzantines to conquer the Persians. The Jewish Encyclopedia proudly
refers to Khazaria as having had a "well constituted and tolerant
government, a flourishing trade and a well disciplined army."

Jews who had been banished from Constantinople by the Byzantine
ruler, Leo III, found a home amongst these heretofore pagan Khazars
and, in competition with Mohammedan and Christian missionaries, won
them over to the Judaic faith. Bulan, the ruler of Khazaria, became
converted to Judaism around 740 A.D. His nobles and, somewhat later,
his people followed suit. Some details of these events are contained
in letters exchanged between Khagan Joseph of Khazaria and R. Hasdai
Ibn Shaprut of Cordova, doctor and quasi foreign minister to Sultan
Abd al-Rahman, the Caliph of Spain. This correspondence (around
936-950) was first published in 1577 to prove that the Jews still had
a country of their own - namely, the Kingdom of Khazaria. Judah
Halevi knew of the letters even in 1140. Their authenticity has since
been established beyond doubt.

According to these Hasdai-Joseph letters, Khagan Bulan decided one
day: "Paganism is useless. It is shameful for us to be pagans. Let us
adopt one of the heavenly religions, Christianity, Judaism or Islam."
And Bulan summoned three priests representing the three religions and
had them dispute their creeds before him. But, no priest could
convince the others, or the sovereign, that his religion was the
best. So the ruler spoke to each of them separately. He asked the
Christian priest: "If you were not a Christian or had to give up
Christianity, which would you prefer - Islam or Judaism?" The priest
said: "If I were to give up Christianity, I would become a Jew."
Bulan then asked the follower of Islam the same question, and the
Moslem also chose Judaism. This is how Bulan came to choose Judaism
for himself and the people of Khazaria in the seventh century A.D.,
and thereafter the Khazars (sometimes spelled Chazars and Khozars)
lived according to Judaic laws.

Under the rule of Obadiah, Judaism gained further strength in
Khazaria. Synagogues and schools were built to give instruction in
the Bible and the Talmud. As Professor Graetz notes in his History of
the Jews, "A successor of Bulan who bore the Hebrew name of Obadiah
was the first to make serious efforts to further the Jewish religion.
He invited Jewish sages to settle in his dominions, rewarded them
royally... and introduced a divine service modeled on the ancient
communities. After Obadiah came a long series of Jewish Chagans
(Khagans), for according to a fundamental law of the state only
Jewish rulers were permitted to ascend the throne." Khazar traders
brought not only silks and carpets of Persia and the Near East but
also their Judaic faith to the banks of the Vistula and the Volga.
But the Kingdom of Khazaria was invaded by the Russians, and Itil,
its great capital, fell to Sweatoslav of Kiev in 969. The Byzantines
had become afraid and envious of the Khazars and, in a joint
expedition with the Russians, conquered the Crimean portion of
Khazaria in 1016. (Crimea was known as "Chazaria" until the 13th
century). The Khazarian Jews were scattered throughout what is now
Russia and Eastern Europe. Some were taken North where they joined
the established Jewish community of Kiev.

Others returned to the Caucasus. Many Khazars remarried in the
Crimea and in Hungary. The Cagh Chafut, or "mountain Jews," in the
Caucasus and the Hebraile Jews of Georgia are their descendants.
These "Ashkenazim Jews" (as Jews of Eastern Europe are called), whose
numbers were swelled by Jews who fled from Germany at the time of the
Crusades and during the Black Death, have little or no trace of
Semitic blood.

That the Khazars are the lineal ancestors of Eastern European
Jewry is a historical fact. Jewish historians and religious text
books acknowledge the fact, though the propagandists of Jewish
nationalism belittle it as pro-Arab propaganda. Somewhat ironically,
Volume IV of the Jewish Encyclopedia - because this publication
spells Khazars with a "C" instead of a "K" - is titled "Chazars to
Dreyfus": and it was the Dreyfus trial, as interpreted by Theodor
Herzl, that made the modern Jewish Khazars of Russia forget their
descent from converts to Judaism and accept anti-Semitism as proof of
their Palestinian origin.

For all that anthropologists know, Hitler's ancestry might go back
to one of the ten Lost Tribes of 'Israel'; while Weizmann may be a
descendant of the Khazars, the converts to Judaism who were in no
anthropological respect related to Palestine. The home to which
Weizmann, Silver and so many other Ashkenazim Zionists have yearned
to return has most likely never been theirs. "Here's a paradox, a
paradox, a most ingenious paradox": in anthropological fact, many
Christians may have much more Hebrew-'Israelite' blood in their veins
than most of their Jewish neighbors.

Race can play funny tricks on people who make that concept the
basis for their likes and dislikes. Race-obsessed people can find
themselves hating people who, in fact, may be their own racial kith
and kin.

"When a Jew, in America or in South Africa, talks to
his Jewish companions about 'our' government, he means the
government of Israel."